Four months, no break, toes being trodden on – sounds like one long party. Also, Alan Wilder was becoming progressively more proficient as the 'studio techno-bod' and began to muscle in on the role previously taken by Miller and Jones. While this undoubtedly added to the intense, claustrophobic feel to the songs, it left Jones emotionally shattered – "I'd never do anything like that again," he would later remark.
Miller - inspired by German film director Werner Herzog's idea of 'living the art' - suggested recording in one continuous session spanning four months, with no days off. The album was produced by Mute's Daniel Miller and Gareth Jones (who had worked with the band on previous albums) and recorded at London's Westside studios and at Hansa in Berlin. The method of recording Black Celebration also shoveled on extra pressure. When record company suits began to vet Gore's embryonic new material, he "freaked out" and disappeared for a week, holing up with an old school exchange friend in rural northern Germany, complaining that "the business did my head right in." Gahan would later state that if Depeche Mode were ever to have split up "it would have been at the end of 1985." The stop-gap single 'It's Called A Heart' had been a weak offering and the band were unsure of their next musical step.
By late 1985, the newly-married Dave Gahan was sober and judgmental of Gore's hedonistic Berlin lifestyle. While Gore's writing, coupled with keyboardist Alan Wilder's increasing influence, had taken the band away from their fluffy electro-pop beginnings, there was still an ungainliness about the Depeche Mode sound.īlack Celebration saw Depeche Mode step out of their 'gangly teenager' phase, even though the album was created in an extremely difficult period for the band. However, even the big singles suffered from clunky sixth-form poetry (see 'People Are People' and 'Everything Counts') or mildly embarrassing displays of sexuality, as on the clumsy S&M metaphors of 'Master And Servant'. Both 1983's Construction Time Again and the following year's Some Great Reward generated more hits and strengthened their fanbase in Europe and America. He was keen that Black Celebration was not seen as a self-indulgent, depressive record - the title track itself being a call to rejoice the end of another humdrum day.Īnd it is not to say that Gore hadn't been pivotal to the evolution of Depeche Mode during the intervening years that followed Clarke's departure. He could be wildly foppish - claiming to be inspired by "Camus, Kafka and Brecht" - but was rooted in the mind-numbing nature of the everyday struggle. He experimented in fashion – with a particular penchant for women's clothes – and was intrigued by sex clubs and the S&M scene. He had moved to Berlin, and enjoyed the freedom and creativity of the art scene. Martin Gore was undergoing an intense period of personal change in 1985-86. Gore stepped up to take the main writing duties and if, perhaps, it took him a couple of albums to truly find a groove, Black Celebration was the point that the Basildon quartet became very, very interesting. As one of Britain's most prolific hit-makers, Clarke's were big shoes to fill – he already had written the synth-pop classics 'New Life' and 'Just Can't Get Enough' for the Mode, and would go on to further success with Yazoo, The Assembly and Erasure. Black Celebration winkled a legion of Mode fans out of the closet.įive years earlier, Depeche Mode had lost their principal songwriter, Vince Clarke. While America seemed to already 'get' Depeche Mode (they succeeded as a new-wave pop band who could also fit snugly next to REM on a college radio playlist), they still possessed the whiff of 'guilty pleasure' in their home country. But more than that, Black Celebration was perhaps a turning point for the band in the UK.
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He provided lead vocals on (an unprecedented) four tracks, including the angst-infected 'World Full Of Nothing' and the fabulous dirge of 'A Question Of Lust'. "If you call yourself a pop band," remarked Gore at the time, "you can get away with a lot more." It was the record on which Gore's burgeoning writing skills thrust him deeper into the epicentre of an already successful group. Black Celebration is a fine and kinky record that signaled a transition in Depeche Mode's career they became darker, sonically more adventurous and sweetly subversive. It's always the quiet ones.Īrtistically, Gore had come a long way by 1986. By his mid-twenties, he had taken to wearing rubber fetish gear and singing 'A Question Of Lust' (containing the couplet "My weaknesses / You know each and every one") to hundreds of thousands of people with his band Depeche Mode. According to his family, Martin Gore was a shy, introverted child.
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